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Art and Design Theses Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design

Spring 5-3-2017

WARP/WEFT: AGNES MARTIN, TEXTILES, AND THE LINEAR WARP/WEFT: AGNES MARTIN, TEXTILES, AND THE LINEAR

EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE

Ariana Yandell Georgia State University

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WARP/WEFT: AGNES MARTIN, TEXTILES, AND THE LINEAR EXPERIENCE

by

ARIANA YANDELL

Under the Direction of Susan Richmond, PhD

ABSTRACT

This essay is a study of Agnes Martin (1912-2004), a Canadian-born and American-based

contemporary artist, and her earlier painting practice including, but not limited, to her work

Falling Blue of 1963. The exploration of this piece and others frames Martin’s early work as a

process of material exploration analogous to weaving and fiber art. This framing is enhanced by

the friendship and professional exchange between Martin and artist Lenore Tawney (1907-2007).

The textile lens, as explored in this paper, has been undeveloped compared to other approaches

to Martin’s early work and practice.

INDEX WORDS: Painting, Textiles, Contemporary Art, Grids, Buddhism, Abstract

Expressionism, Lenore Tawney

WARP/WEFT: AGNES MARTIN, TEXTILES, AND THE LINEAR EXPERIENCE

by

ARIANA YANDELL

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the College of Arts and Sciences

Georgia State University

2017

Copyright by

Ariana Rose Yandell

2017

WARP/WEFT: AGNES MARTIN, TEXTILES, AND THE LINEAR EXPERIENCE

by

ARIANA YANDELL

Committee Chair: Susan Richmond

Committee: Maria Gindhart

Audrey Goodman

Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2017

iv

DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my father, Aldo Yandell, who was always a source of

kindness and laughter. I also dedicate this essay to my parents Lisa and Andrew Campbell, for

their constant and loving encouragement.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis committee members, Dr. Susan Richmond, Dr. Maria Gindhart,

and Dr. Audrey Goodman, for their expertise and support, academic and otherwise.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………….iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………v

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………….vii

1 INTRODUCTION………………………….……………………………….…..1

2 AGNES MARTIN REVIEWS………..………………………………………...14

3 PEDAGOGICAL LEGACY……………………………………………………24

4 ART AND SPIRITUALITY……………………………………………………32

5 MATERIALS, SPIRIT, TEXTILES, AND PAINTING………….…………..41

6 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….…………47

WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………….………..49

vii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963

Figure 2: Lenore Tawney, The Queen, 1962

Figure 3: Lenore Tawney, Lekythos, 1962

Figure 4: Agnes Martin, White Flower, 1960

Figure 5: Agnes Martin, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, 1953

Figure 6: Lenore Tawney in her Chicago studio, 1957

Figure 7: Lenore Tawney, St. Francis and the Birds, 1954

Figure 8: Agnes Martin, Homage to Greece, 1959

Figure 9: Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees, 16th-century

1

1 INTRODUCTION

Agnes Martin’s Falling Blue of 1963 (Fig.1) is an oil and graphite painting purchased by

the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1974. This large painting (approximately 71 by 72

inches) contains the grid-like structure Martin is known for in her overall oeuvre. A square lies

within the canvas, comprised of thinly painted blue horizontal bands, with alternating graphite

lines in between. Behind these horizontal structures, three evenly spaced vertical graphite lines

create four columns. The viewer is confronted with both the irregularity of the painterly line and

the underlying draughtsman-like structure of the graphite. The architecture of the grid imparts a

sense of delicacy and an almost unattainable materiality. While I am not limiting my exploration

to Falling Blue alone, this work serves as a pertinent case study to examine the nature of the grid

in Martin’s work.

To simplify the structure of Falling Blue is to align it with the grid. The emphasis and

scholarship on the grid in Martin’s work is divided into two periods, her work before 1967 and

after 1973 (she decidedly quit painting between 1967 and 1973). While the grid became a more

definitive archetype in Martin’s post-1973 work, her pre-1967 work involved a heavy amount of

experimentation regarding line and grids. During the 1960s, her work on paper and canvas is

indicative of a visually defined linear experimentation, deviating drastically from her production

of art in the 1950s, which contained landscapes and abstracted, non-geometric forms.

2

Scholarship about Martin’s early artistic career—the 1940s and 1950s—discusses her

experimentation and artistic production primarily in terms of Surrealism and Abstract

Expressionism.1 Scholars writing on Martin’s work from the 1960s on, in terms of Minimalism

and various painterly forms of Modernism, have theorized the origin or use of the grid. The

artist’s elusive interest in spirituality, her personal history of mental illness, and regional ties to

New Mexico have also colored accounts and added a sense of mysticism about Martin and her

evolution as an artist invested in the grid. Instead of continuing the discussion of the etiology of

the grid in painting alone, I will focus on Martin’s early work and the grid in terms of another

medium: textiles. While her friendship with textile artists such as Lenore Tawney, an artist

resident of The Coenties Slip, is referenced in scholarship, scholars rarely moves beyond loose

notions of inspiration or a biographical reference point.

The Coenties Slip became a locus for artists in the late 1950s up until 1965.2 Located at

the southernmost tip of Manhattan, The Slip was rich with nautical history as part of the city’s

earliest surviving harbors. It held a sort of romance of New York’s seafaring past and is

referenced in well-known literary works by Walt Wittman and Herman Melville. By the time

artists arrived in 1956-57, the abandoned sail lofts of The Slip were attractive—not to mention

cheap—living quarters and studio spaces. The artists who inhabited The Slip include Robert

Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, Jack Youngerman as well as Lenore Tawney and Ann

1 Abstract Expressionism is a term that used Martin to describe herself throughout her entire

career. Before the 1960s, Abstract Expressionism was a prevailing style used to talk about artists

using non-representational forms in painting. Likewise, Surrealism shows up as a lens for

Martin’s early work in Taos and discussion of Martin’s early painting such as The Expulsion of

Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (1953). See Christina Bryan Rosenberger’s analysis of

Marti’s early maturation of work in relation to Taos. Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the

Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin, (Oakland: The University of Californian Press, 2016),

48-55. 2 From this point onward, I will be using The Slip and The Coenties Slip interchangeably.

3

Wilson. The unlikely access to seafaring nature, as the apartment-studios were roughly three-

quarters surrounded by seascape, was strikingly different from the urban containment deeper into

Manhattan and experienced by other artist communities. A significant body of literature exists

over how artists at The Slip experienced a simultaneous exchange of ideas, materials, and

seafaring references during this time. As opposed to romanticized account of the artist

community, however, relationships were not overtly collaborative but personal and often one-on-

one through conversation and informal studio visits. Artists here were untied more by what they

were not interested in versus what they had in aesthetically in common: They were against the

overarching goliath of Abstract Expressionism’s intellectualization.3 Precedence exists for how

most artists at The Slip either used nautical references in work during their stay at The Slip or

dock-side material for art objects. In relation to Martin, literature often focuses on how Ellsworth

Kelly and Agnes Martin’s frequent breakfasting together accelerated Kelly’s practice. However,

attention to how fiber artists, such as Lenore Tawney, may have affected Martin’s work is

lacking. How was this relationship beneficial in determining the artistic production of Agnes

Martin in the 1960s?

To further the associations of textiles, spirituality, and the grid, I will compare the work,

mutual flow of inspiration and methodological similarities between Lenore Tawney and Agnes

Martin throughout this essay. First, I identify instances of textile language used in exhibition

reviews and exhibition catalog essays about Martin’s work. Secondly, I examine the pedagogical

influence on Martin and Tawney’s work, including the Bauhaus legacy in textiles and

pedagogical training in painting. Following this analysis, I will examine how both artists used

similar language based on spiritual terminology and allusions to discuss their artistic production,

3 Mildred Glimcher, “Coenties Slip,” in Indiana Kelly Martin Rosenquist Yongerman At Coenties

Slip, Robert Indiana, et. al. (New York: Pace Gallery, 1993), 7-10.

4

often citing ideas of purity, essence, and/or spirit. I demonstrate, through a Hegelian reading of

Kandinsky’s art writing, how the linguistic choices of Martin and Tawney relate to ideas of inner

necessity (Innere Notwendigkeit) and World-Spirit (Weltgeist). Lastly, I examine the material

relationship between textile and painting that Martin utilizes through an exploration of material,

concepts, and process like Tawney. Overall, the purpose of this thesis is not to imply a derivative

association between Martin and Tawney, but to assert an approach that challenges the

teleological history of the grid in painting through consideration of the warp and weft, a grid-like

structure inherent to textiles and canvas.

A grid can be defined in graphic design terms as a plane of intersecting lines, often

serving as a foundation upon which to build. In geometry, the grid can be a tool for plotting

coordinates and even a genre of paper for mathematicians and designers alike. In histories of

modern art, grids have been a mainstay, hardly in need of an introduction.4 Among the first art

historians to elaborate on their significance contemporaneously, Rosalind Krauss mentions

Martin in her seminal text “Grids.” Krauss seeks to locate a framework to completely assess the

history of the grid in 20th-century painting away from a sequential and structuralist history

embedded with myth-making. Likewise, Lucy Lippard’s catalog essay for the Philadelphia

Institute of Contemporary Art in 1972 tackles the teleological history of the grid in art history

with a nod to Martin.5 Lippard posits that the grid serves as a means to an end for most

contemporary artists and delves into the various approaches towards grid work used by artists

including Sol Lewitt, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin. Lippard allocates

4 In Modern art, the grid became a frequent compositional element dating back to cubist works

by Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Marsden Hartley, etc., but has additional origins in terms of its

organizational presence in perspective, such as studies by Uccello and Albrecht Dürer, dating

from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. See Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," October, 9, (1979): 51. 5 Lucy Lippard, Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids (Philadelphia: Institute of

Contemporary Art, 1972).

5

Martin's grids as "linear tensions" that exemplify an "unrepetitive use of a repetitive medium."6

In most cases, this analysis of the grid stems from dialog centered around drawing, painting and

more recently sculpture. But importantly, a grid can also take the form of warp and weft, the

fabric of the canvas, and further, textiles themselves. What of this connection to Agnes Martin’s

early grid paintings and drawings?

In my analysis of Martin’s grid paintings from the 1960s, her work easily elicits three

different viewing experiences: up close, at middle distance, then slightly far away. From a

distance, a passerby might register Martin’s painting as being color solids, almost Rothkoian but

lacking his definitive dry-brushed edges. From a middle-distance, the linear element slowly

emerges, the subtle breakage of color is acutely felt at this distance. Up close, the eye struggles

to keep up with the brevity of Martin’s visible lines, with their leaps and bounds, the hand

exposed in their construction. From this close vantage point, the delicate balance of color tonality

within the canvas field—formed by two to three applications of paint and/or gesso—with

graphite lines deepens the visual experience. In Falling Blue, the weave of the canvas is doubly

emphasized: First at the middle distance with the carefully banded blue horizontals and graphite

lines intersecting three vertical graphite lines, and secondly, upon close inspection with the

lightly applied paint, exposing the bordering weave of the canvas.

Simply put, when one views a grid painting like Falling Blue by Agnes Martin, one

cannot stand still to completely take it in. By this I do not imply that there is one physical stance

required to get it and that getting it has one achievable format like a mechanical transaction, but

that the viewer quite literally needs to move to enact the experience of viewing implied by the

piece. This may seem like an average observation but in consideration of Martin’s emphasis in

6 Lippard, Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids Grids,13.

6

the 1960s on the experience of nature and art—and more importantly the nautical life at the

Coenties Slip—it is so important that it needs to set the tone for a proper observation on the type

of optical effects happening in the canvas.7 Falling Blue can be perceived as one oceanic

reference from Martin’s time at The Slip.8 Nature for Martin became of elemental importance for

abstracting an experience of confronting nature. When we see her use of line, we can relate the

undulating horizontals to the vast and breaking lines within a calm sea. Martin’s most recent

traveling retrospective brought to light sculptural works using dock materials and a gamified

version of the ocean that seemed very uncharacteristic of the artist, but also reifies the

experimental period Martin experienced in reaching a painterly grid structure.9 Sculptures

included In Falling Blue, while the viewer both senses the structure of the grid from the middle

and far distances, up close—say two feet away—exposed is the hand’s irregularity with no

moment of rest for the eyes. This subtle fluctuation—this fluttering of a persistent hand—creates

a sense of movement or pulse that can only occasionally be observed while the vast periphery of

one’s vision is acutely felt. Falling Blue in fact may very well express the impossibility of

7 Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania, 1973), 9. 8 “When people go to the ocean they like to see it all day…They don’t expect to see, to find all

that response in painting…It’s a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight,

you wouldn’t want anything else…I want to draw a certain response like this.” Interview with

Ann Wilson, “Linear Webs,” Art and Artists 1, no.7 (October 1966): 246, In Nancy Princenthal,

Her Life and Art, (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015), 131-132. 9 Pieces of note in the Guggenheim iteration of the traveling Agnes Martin retrospective from

2015-2016 are: The Wave (1963) made of plexiglass, wood, and beads; The Garden (1958) made

of found objects and oil on wood; Burning Tree (1961) consisting of wood and metal; Dominoes

(1960) consisting of oil on paper then mounted on canvas. Nautical themes are brought up in the

paintings of Martin and fiber work of Tawney. For Martin, this includes The Dark River (1961),

The Islands (1961), and Night Sea (1963). For Tawney, a similar experimentation with found

objects include Dark River (1961). Such examples are viable references for how environment

and access to materials affected Martin’s production at The Slip.

7

confronting the ocean, where Martin once mentioned containing form loses a sense of its own

meaning.10

More analytically minded viewers might find themselves fixated on the numerical

frequencies of the vertical and horizontal elements, even cataloging the intersections and cells to

reveal some sort of innermost harmony. If Martin were ever to confront the viewing practice of

one such individual, no doubt, she would scoff. In a conversation over Martin’s life, artist

Richard Tuttle, with whom she was close during her lifetime, relayed an anecdote in which both

artists looked up at the sky. One night outside in an open field with Martin, Tuttle stated that he

enjoyed the stars and Martin stated quite bluntly that she enjoyed the spaces in between.11 This

anecdote also echoes published lecture notes by Martin describing how to overcome feelings of

defeat when painting by making oneself available to inspiration: “To penetrate the night is one

thing. But to be penetrated by the night, that is to be overtaken.”12 By acknowledging the in

between spaces of stars and the idea of being overtaken by the night, Martin’s rhetoric includes a

glimpse of the work in mentally constructing a relationship with an art object. The experience is

both a mental and physical one. But to further the physicality of both Martin’s art and its

perceived materiality, it is also useful to approach a social element of Martin’s early practice.

Brendan Prendeville makes the claim in his analysis of Martin’s work that through a

combination of factors such as the performative space created through Abstract Expressionism,

Martin’s rejection of the impersonal approach of Minimalism, and the importance of friendship

10 Princenthal, Her Life and Art, 131-132. 11 Richard Tuttle, “Reflections on Agnes Martin.” Lecture, The Solomon R. Guggenheim

Museum, New York, NY, December 14, 2016. 12 Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin (Munchen: Kunstraum Munchen, 1972), 48.

8

at the Coenties Slip, the social element of her early work is an important element to consider.13

Before the complete institutionalization of Jackson Pollock’s drips, these gestural splatters were

innovative in their mark-making tracery of Pollock’s movements, imprinting the dance between

the canvas and artist. While we could elevate the emotive power of machismo drips, this dance

between canvas, artist, and the final product as a record of this dance, has a personable and

performative element. The social element implicit in the performance of work and the mark-

making of the hand is catalyzed by the sense of movement required of the viewer interacting

with Martin’s canvases. In textiles, the social element is implicit in the legacy of tapestries as an

object-occupant of a living space as well as its participatory need of in-the-round inspection as

an art object. To extend this conversation towards defining a textile process suggestive in

Martin’s early practice, it is pertinent to introduce fellow Slip resident Lenore Tawney as an

integral reference point. The performative encounter implicit in the work of viewing Martin’s

early paintings and drawings has a parallel in the object-occupant encounter of Tawney’s fiber

art objects.

Artist Lenore Tawney shifted from weaving to drawing and collage in 1964, making

forms that mesh and press lines into space, converging to a sharp point. In the same year of

Martin’s Falling Blue, Tawney exhibited in a group show titled Woven Forms at the then

Museum of Contemporary Crafts, now Museum of Art and Design in New York City. These

woven forms of Tawney, for which the exhibition was named, produced an innovative approach

to weaving that breached the walls of tapestry and delved into the territory of site-specific

installation. Her woven forms were immensely vertical woven structure with a variation of

negative space created by vertical slits, lightening the overall structure of her weavings. A 1969

13 Brendan Prendeville, “The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,”

Oxford Art Journal 53, (2008): 51 – 73.

9

exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled Wall Hangings acknowledges the variant avenues

of weaving bringing forth an era of lightness. I term this notion as material-levity: a focus on

material weightlessness both implied and actual taken up by artists in their respective medium

used. For weaving, this takes the linear parameters of a dense, interlinked rectilinear plane and

disperses the warp and weft to a thread-bare, or sketch-like presence. For painting, material

levity implies a veiling of the material presence of a canvas through a consistent and structured

framework of line and color as well as a light application of said elements.

Specifically, in Wall Hangings what was claimed was that weavers were leaving the

impression of a tapestry versus the grandiose wall hangings related to the tradition of tapestries.14

The airy gaps implied in material-levity are of a certain centrality in Tawney’s works such as The

Queen (Fig. 2) with an open warp weave combining solid sections of weaving. The

weightlessness of the sculptural piece can be likened to the exposed weave of Martin’s canvases,

where the material base of the canvas is in dialog with the levels of opacity of colors used and in

delineations of line. To a more extreme opacity of linen and sculptural conformity, Tawney’s

woven form Lekythos (Fig. 3) looks barely tethered to its monofilament bar, with the open warp

becoming the central, slit-forming agent. Lines of threadbare linen both cascade from the

monofilament and blend into a veil, collapsing the piece to a two-dimensionality suggesting the

drawings of Paul Klee. While the Wall Hangings exhibition hailed the sketch-like qualities

derivative of the American weavers included in the exhibition, a firm conclusion separated their

innovations, including Tawney’s, from technological innovations taken up by contemporary

painters. This painterly innovation included the stripping of and reimaging the object-presence of

the canvas. Painters were increasingly interested in assemblage and found materials, especially at

14 Mildred Constantine and Jack Lenor Larsen, Wall Hangings (New York: The Museum of

Modern Art, 1969), n.p.

10

The Slip with dockside materials available in the plenty. For Tawney, found materials were more

frequent to be sure but conceptually, her focus in 1964 to 1966 was explicitly with drawing,

taking the mechanism of the jacquard loom as an instrument of inspiration. In her drawing, an

implied sense of space came from an interest in the manipulation process behind the jacquard

loom, a manipulation that began though the exploration of loom construction and by spontaneous

dropping of materials into the warp/weft of a tapestry.

In relation to the use of line, Mona Schieren uses the term “web,” such as web

movements “Webbewegungen” to compare work of Tawney to Martin.15 Tawney’s woven forms

produce this webbing process twofold, first by the edges and containment of her weavings and

secondly, through the actual intersections of thread and space. Likewise, Martin’s webbing takes

form in Falling Blue as both the intersecting fibers of the canvas exposed by a thin interior

border and through the density of intersecting graphite, paint, and negative space. Ideas such as

space in-between and linear elements became the focus of experimentation in both artists’ work

at a time when critical dialog around art practice was changing. The first encounter that factors

into the disassociation of Bauhaus and design’s theoretical weight in the realm of fiber and

textiles is the distance from painterly Modernism in a Greenbergian New York. In his preface

analyzing clashing theories of engagement within Clement Greenberg’s and Josef Albers’ ideas

on art leading up to the 1950s, Jeffery Saletnik notes “theoretical elision” may have undermined

the Bauhaus’s role in conversation on medium specificity.16 Greenberg’s art criticism produced a

15 Mona Schieren, Agnes Martin: Transkulturelle Übersetzung (Munchen: Verlag Silke

Schreiber, 2016), 244. 16 Jeffrey Saletnik, "Pedagogic Objects: Josef Albers, Greenbergian Modernism, and the

Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, Ed. Jeffrey

Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 84.

in America," in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism (New York:

Routledge, 2009), 84.

11

passive relationship of art-viewing, Albers and the Bauhaus an active one heavily process-

oriented. For Greenberg, the artistic process was a means to an end versus a Bauhaus means for

exploration. Martin’s work became somewhat isolated to the realm of painting without much

exchange while the opposite is true for Tawney’s critical reception. The legacy of Greenberg’s

modernism, with the question of the differences between a disinterested and engaged viewer—

the Kantian legacy within painting especially—is imbedded in the art critical dialog produced in

the 1960s.

In the 1960s at The Slip, Martin was swept up in the Minimalist lens of exhibitions such

as 10 and Systemic Painting, while Tawney had a widely-acclaimed exhibition with her newly

created Woven Forms exhibition before changing direction altogether the following year. By

taking note of critical dialog around Martin’s early work, we can identify the road blocks that

have either helped or hindered the associations of site-specificity as a means of visual

engagement. Material-levity implicit in Martin’s early 1960s grids are a connecting vantage

point of how Martin’s process now may have converged with the likes of Lenore Tawney.

Martin’s move to New York and initial gallery representation by Betty Parsons placed Martin in

the shadow of Greenberg approved goliaths such as Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. In

my defense of a textile process from Martin’s early years, what is overlooked in Martin’s work is

the performative act of viewing, transculturation with spirituality, and the linguistic choices used

by Martin in defining her practice in relation to a potential Bauhaus methodology. These vantage

points imbue material-levity with a sense of intellectual agency that both Martin and Tawney

were developing while in New York in the 1960s. While there is an exhaustive reservoir of

information concerning painterly grids in relationship to order, form, and emotion, these

relationships oft downplay if not ignore textile materiality as a conceptual tool to reach these

12

ideas. Beginning with Martin's arrival in New York, conflicting voices have claimed Martin's

graphite grids to meet ends within the framework of group shows as a definitive stance away

from Greenberg Modernism and its cultural associations with Abstract Expressionism. To further

define language that either helped or hindered a potential textile process in Martin's grids, we

must examine Martin's early reception and reviews in New York.

Figure 1: Agnes Martin, Falling Blue, 1963, oil and graphite on linen, 71 7/8 x 72 in.,

Collection of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, © 2017 Agnes Martin/Artists

Rights Society (ARS), New York

13

Figure 2: Lenore Tawney, The Queen, 1962, Linen, 160. x 30 in., Courtesy, Lenore G. Tawney

Foundation

Figure 3: Lenore Tawney, Lekythos, 1962 Linen; 50 x 31 3⁄4 x 1 3⁄4 in., Courtesy, Lenore

G. Tawney Foundation

14

2 AGNES MARTIN REVIEWS

Through writings by critics and art historians concerning Martin’s early work, we can see

glimpses of a potential textile approach seen in Martin’s practice. Nancy Princenthal infers that

while Martin was in New Mexico before her move to New York in 1957, the artist remained

influenced by European Modernism, but that native textiles out of the Southwest may have been

a contributing influence when she resided in the state.17 The interest in Native American textiles

and spirituality was in part fueled by the arts and literary community present in New Mexico

since the turn of the 20th century. The theosophical atmosphere of New Mexico art colonies had

been constructed not only by philosophers and writers, but also by artists before her. By the

1950s, lecture circuits were introducing Asiatic ideas to the New York art world. Martin’s early

landscape abstractions from New Mexico aligned with emerging biomorphic forms like of Kenzo

Okada, a painter of Japanese descent who had accompanied Betty Parsons to New Mexico in

1957 and 1958.18 Through various visits to New Mexico and slight encouragement by Okada,

Parsons extended an invitation to Martin to represent her in New York. When Martin arrived in

New York with Parsons as her gallerist, Martin was in the shadows of shows of Rothko and

Pollock, championed by Clement Greenberg, whose expressionist authority dominated the New

York art world in 1957. This artistic star-power often took form in the living location of artists

such as Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and, alternatively, those arriving at The Slip.

The Slip as an alternative artist-residence became a community associated with divergent

practices and ideologies from mainstream Greenbergian Abstract Expressionism.

17 Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, 62. 18 Nancy Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, 63.

15

A lasting element of Greenberg ideology was the Modernist language of originality and

the preference for “identifying key structural invariants” left little room for discussing the effects

of viewing Martin’s work.19 The intensity of Martin’s application of the line in her grids, via

graphite or gesso, were initially made insignificant by the compositional whole of grids in art

criticism. Critical responses to Martin’s initial introduction to New York also aligned with a

romantic image of the artist’s process with a poetic responsiveness that only began to give way

to a different sensibility in the 1960s.20 Martin’s inclusion at an exhibition at Section 11 followed

by a review by Dore Ashton framed Martin’s use of color as a “benign essence of the mesa

country.”21 Dore Ashton was the first art critic/art historian to write about Martin upon her

arrival in New York. A year later, in a review of Martin’s work, Ashton’s assertions of an

intrinsic tie of Martin with the New Mexico landscape are more palpable. First articulated was a

firm association of landscape as an active source represented in Martin’s work.22 Secondly,

Ashton framed her American claims in painting to “Indian culture” and land, thus melding the

association of the American west as per the legacy of O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and others

associated with New Mexico art colonies pre-World War Two.23 The experiential importance of

her work paled in description compared to the figurative association of landscape. In the 1960s,

art historians were inclined to first address the structural aims of recent aesthetic changes in the

art world as in the case of Lawrence Alloway’s exhibition Systemic Painting, or as in the case of

19 Brendan Prendeville, "The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans,"

Oxford Art Journal 53, (2008): 61. 20 Christina Bryan Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin (Oakland:

University of California Press, 2016), 13-47. 21 Dore Ashton, “Premier Exhibition for Agnes Martin,” The New York Times, December 6,

1958. 22 Ashton, “Art: Drawn From Nature; Agnes Martin's Paintings at Section 11 Gallery Reflect

Love of Prairies,” The New York Times, December 29, 1959. 23 Ashton, “Art: Drawn From Nature,” n.p.

16

Dore Ashton, affirm the poetics in Martin’s emotional affects.24 In her analysis of Martin’s

reception in Europe, art historian Maria Müller-Schareck notes that it wasn’t until the early

1980s that art historians and curators were focusing specifically how viewers respond to work by

Martin.25 In analysis of a spectrum of stances towards Martin’s work, Christina Bryan

Rosenberger notes the pivotal moment Ashton was a part of one critical direction in Martin’s

reception, where a Western mythology combined with answering to a “physical and cultural

environment.”26 Rosenberger notes that this approach proved powerful in selling work, recalling

the history of landscape paintings well-received in New York, and grounds Martin’s art in

figurative representation, again an aspect of landscape iconography. While Ashton's reviews on

Martin evolved over time, her initial writing set a tone often repeated in other criticism on

Martin's work, that is decisively romantic. The second area of critical reception is entrenched in

abstraction, with focus on the linear and geometric formations in Martin’s work. However, the

gulf between both perspectives either privileged the expressive tendencies intrinsic to the

physical and optical presence with her work or claimed the overarching schema, and repetitive

system, by her use of both color and line. In terms of theoretical writings on schemas with formal

standards produced a Classist stance. In one passage from The Untroubled Mind, Martin claims:

Plato states that all that exists are shadows,

To a detached person the complication of the involved life

is like chaos

24 Maria Müller-Schareck, “‘Out into the World’: How Agnes Martin’s Paintings Reached

Germany and Western Europe,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc.,

2015): 196. 25 Müller-Schareck, “‘Out into the World’: How Agnes Martin’s Paintings Reached Germany

and Western Europe,” 201. 26 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line: The Early Works of Agnes Martin,118.

17

If you don’t like the chaos you’re a classist

If you like it you’re a romanticist27

In fact, Nancy Princenthal states in this instance that Martin was “Converting Plato’s

lightless cave to a realm of clarity and freedom, [where] Martin infuses it with perfection, an

inversion that may have resulted from compounding Plato with Buddhism.”28 In contribution to

the second direction, in which a conversation concerning a more classist direction was furthered

throughout Martin’s career, were critical responses from Lawrence Alloway, Rosalind Krauss

and Donald Judd.

Beginning in the 1960s, critics were laying claim the innovative approaches of Martin

and her contemporaries. First of import to markedly shape Martin’s presence was Lawrence

Alloway. Between 1961 and 1966, Alloway wrote four catalog essays about Martin’s work, the

last of which corresponded to his exhibition at the Guggenheim, entitled Systemic Painting.29 In

this moment, terminology and criteria were being claimed country-wide for the newly emergent

artwork that focused on structured, non-objective forms in painting. In Systemic Painting,

Alloway clears out the storehouse of makeshift terms used to describe the marked shift to what is

now primarily termed as Minimalism, as Systematic painting—in which a repeated system or

organization structure is used. In condemning a Greenbergian “neglect of non-physiognomic art”

27 Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” in Geometric Abstraction in America, John Gordon,

(New York: Praeger, 1962), 131. 28 Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Her Art, 192-193 29 See exhibition catalogs Lawrence Alloway, 6 Abstract Painters (London: Arthur Tooth and

Sons, 1960; Lawrence Alloway and Sam Hunter, Recent American Drawings (Waltham,

Massachusets, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 1964); Lawrence Alloway,

American Drawings (New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1964); Lawrence

Alloway, Systemic Painting (New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1966).

18

and consolidating a proliferation of terminology30 used to describe geometric art’s newly

reacquired prominence, Alloway emphasizes the variant benefits of repetitive systems as

eliciting newfound meaning in art.31 Alloway also states that systems are a way of escaping from

absolutes previously used to define ideas of order and, as he summarizes, “A system is as human

as a splash of paint, more so when the splash gets routinized.”32 But where Alloway falters in his

grouping of Martin within such a categorical term, is when he asserts that systemic painters have

an end-result of a painting conceived before completion, a trait more intrinsically tied to

Minimalism.33As beneficial as this perspective of systems is to lending Martin’s early practice to

a correlation to weaving as a system, which physically and ideological pushed against the

mechanical in art practice, the systemic label proves to still isolate Martin’s work as painterly

object. An object whose innovation serves as a means for itself in painting alone. Alloway began

his notice of Martin’s work from a collective standpoint and it would not be until Martin’s solo

exhibition in 1973 that Alloway’s observations became more substantive for a textile association

versus collective painterly observation. A reaction against the constraints of labels concerning

systems takes form in Martin’s “extended prose poem” turned artist statement in her The

Untroubled Mind printed in her 1973 exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art of The

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in which Martin’s term ‘inspiration’ becomes

prevalent.34 Art Historian Francis Morris takes these two instances and notes that while both

Alloway and Martin subscribe to minimizing the role of process and pre-planning in art making,

30 Terms include Hard Edge, Field Painting, Abstract Classicists, and One Image painting. See

Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, 11-20. 31 Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, 17. 32 Lawrence Alloway, Systemic Painting, 17. 33 Frances Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” in Agnes Martin (New York,

Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 2015), 62. 34 Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” 63.

19

Martin held an opposition to the conceptual “idea and ego” understood by an initial reading of

Alloway’s conceptualism.35

Morris also notes “Martin was not alone among her contemporaries in speaking of the

creative process in terms of inspiration: From Barnett Newman to Lenore Tawney there were

many in her ‘circle’ that downplayed personal agency in favor of revelation…”36 Revelation or

inspiration would increasingly appear in Martin’ interviews and writings after 1973, being a term

used as a tool in which Martin describes harnessing the essence of life, art, and art viewing.

Inspiration and intuition would tactically serve Martin’s expressiveness in creating line in her

gridwork, much in the same way that line became of meditative importance in Tawney’s

exploration of the jacquard loom in drawings and woven forms. Notions of negative space as

material and the philosophical negation of ego in the self—combined with the push against a

romantic claim of genius or mastery by a passive claim of intuition—posits an alternative form

of experience intrinsic to the art-object encounter. Important to this intuitive experience, as per

Martin and Tawney’s practice, is the spatial role of art objects.

The concept of intuition as intellection, a term by Richard Tobin’s analysis of Martin’s

work The Islands (1961), is present in Rosalind Krauss’ interpretation of Martin’s work.37 In her

initial iteration of “Grids” in 1979, Rosalind Krauss insinuates two directions grids have served

in art: spatial and temporal. The spatial grid favors the farthest pole away from imitation of

35 Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” 63. 36 Morris, “Agnes Martin: Innocence and Experience,” 63. 37 In my using of the term “Intuition as Intellection,” I am deriving this association from the

analysis of The Islands (1961) by Richard Tobin in which he equates a similarity between Martin

and Ellsworth Kelly’s usage of Mondrian’s grid. Tobin also traces Martin’s 1950s friendship

with Ad Reinhart to “themes and literary allusions” from their mutual interest in “contemplative”

traditions present within The Untroubled Mind. See Richard Tobin, “The Islands 1961,” in Agnes

Martin (New York, Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 2015), 78-79.

20

nature, whereas the temporal grid is in line with nineteenth-century aesthetics that are seemingly

ubiquitous and impervious to time.38 Familiar tones of the universality of Mind and Spirt are

echoed from the legacy of Mondrian. Krauss notes that there is a sense of materiality and release

when confronting Martin’s and Ad Reinhart’s work.39 Krauss concludes that the case of the grid

needs an etiological investigation versus a historical investigation and echoes the concern for a

search of originality in a grid. Donald Judd’s reviews of shows containing work by Martin,

focused more on the effectiveness of material autonomy with individual art objects. For Martin’s

case, her grids were indicators in and of themselves. Donald Judd, whose art criticism paved a

definitive path for Minimalist art, reviewed Martin’s work, initially warning of its “plastic”

qualities bordering close to the decorative.40 However, in subsequent reviews, Judd speaks

favorably towards the “woven” field, in that Martin’s mark-making comes across as incised. For

example, in White Flower (Fig. 4), the wash of color on the canvas lays dormant while the strong

horizontals of graphite weaves between the irregularities of vertical dots of white. However,

additional reviews of Martin by Judd in the 60s appear brief, drawing attention to their “quiet”

and “discrete” presence and graphic quality.41 If we take Judd’s woven field observation as an

analogy, Martin’s success to Judd is related to capturing the likeness of a factory-produced linen

over a hand-made alternative. While a mechanical or industrial conversation can open a slew of

conceptual avenues worthy of investigation, this stance diverts from the sensory nature of line

used by Martin in her 1960s grids. Alloway and Krauss would later complicate this stance in that

38 Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," October, 9 (1979), 52-54. 39 Krauss, "Grids," 54. 40 Donald Judd, “In the Galleries,” Arts Magazine 37, no.5 (February 1963): 48. 41 Donald Judd, Complete Writings, 1959-1975: Gallery Reviews, Book Reviews, Articles, Letters

to the Editor, Reports, Statements, Complaints, (Halifax, N.S: Press of the Nova Scotia College

of Art and Design, 1975), 119, 141.

21

Martin’s exposed hand with her rectilinear framework provides a tactile reality with an

alternative material relationship.

Alloway and Krauss later became active players in the construction of and writing for

two separate retrospectives for Martin. Krauss would move away from terms of patterning and

systems to ideas of the tactile and optical.42 And in 1973, when Martin had a retrospective to

inaugurate her reentry into the art world, Alloway made an associative claim to Native American

textiles that the artist found favorable.43 Likewise, as the moment of Martin’s first artist

statement, it is decisive how Alloway and Martin converged in framing her 1950s and 1960s

oeuvre. Alloway’s text over Martin here announces the concept of a material impression, a veil-

like presence formulated by the “network” of coordinates, such as the white dots present in White

Flower, that are far more elusive than is accustomed to grid representation.44 Likewise, Alloway

notes that by 1964, Martin’s extension of the internal grid plane to the edges of the canvas make

her art objects firmly occupy space versus time alone.45 Alloway leaves his readers with the

openness of interpretation on Martin’s forms, briefly calling attention to women artists and their

newly found interest in domestic textiles during the 1960s. It was not lost on Martin’s peers and

colleagues that a surge of feminist artists were laying claim to territory concerning domesticity

and gender, textiles included. Alloway states that Martin also can be seen using the textile

“technique by repetitive forms that resemble stitching” and “motifs of Indian textiles.”46 This

temporary expansion of interpretation provided some light on how Martin’s repetitive forms had

technical qualities that resemble textiles, but perhaps the almost essentialism of women’s work

42 Prendeville, "The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of Americans," 61. 43 Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Her Art, 188. 44 Lawrence Alloway, Agnes Martin, 9. 45 Alloway, Agnes Martin, 9. 46 "Indian" in this instance is a generalization of Native American presence in New

Mexico. Alloway, Agnes Martin, 12.

22

and textiles threatened the position of Martin’s oeuvre as innovative and integral to the echelons

of American painting. And after 1973, Martin’s paintings utilized fewer grids and more

horizontal bands, diverting critical attention back to her optically charged surfaces and color

usage.

For most Martin’s life, serious talk of Bauhaus tenets of design, which held the strongest

weight in American design and textiles theory, did not exist. It is important to note that it was not

until 2004, when Heinz Liesbrock brought Martin’s work to the Josef Albers Museum in

Quadrat, that Albers work was thoroughly compared to Martin’s in relation to his active use of

form.47 Additional factors include Martin’s international debut in Documenta V in 1972 which

aided the artist’s revival into the art world, nationally and internationally, brought with it new

viewers and art writers to react to Martin’s use of grids. It is also interesting to note that during

the 1960s, Martin largely resisted exhibition catalogs concerning her work and rarely spoke on

the matter. Aside from critical response to her work as discussed above, much of what we know

that is usable to describe a textile methodology is preserved through the conversations with

friends and colleagues, Martin’s lectures and writings, and Martin’s pedagogical training. While

it is important to note the steps Alloway made for an interpretively textile approach, reception of

Martin’s work also needs to be seen in terms of her affinity for spiritual allegory and artistic

training. Both Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney in their practice, borrowed heavily from

spiritual allegory and references to imbue their process with experiential agency derived from

notions of void and space created by rectilinear constraints. But before we examine philosophical

47 Maria Muller-Schareck, “‘Out into the World’: How Agnes Martin’s Paintings Reached

Germany and Western Europe,” in Agnes Martin, Frances Morris and Tiffany Bell, et. al., (New

York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 2015), 205.

23

commonality between Martin and Tawney, noting the pedagogical background and training of

Martin will provide insight towards the maturation of her work.

Figure 4: Agnes Martin, White Flower, oil on canvas, 1960, 71 7/8 x 72 in., The Solomon

R. Guggenheim Museum, © 2017 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

24

3 PEDAGOGICAL LEGACY

The pedagogical legacy I will be referring to in this section delves into two ways in

which Agnes Martin’s early work and training align with Bauhaus and fiber art: Her training as

an art educator and artist and her exploration of materials with her grids. Agnes Martin’s work

from the 1940s and 1950s is vastly experimental but serves as a crucial breeding ground for ideas

that would become distilled and matured in the 1960s. Martin, who avidly claimed to be an

Abstract Expressionist, carried on the pedagogical legacy of The Teacher’s College at Columbia

University and the Modernist beginnings of her artistic career.48 In Martin’s time at Teacher’s

College, though various sketches and paintings by the artist as seen in The Expulsion of Adam

and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Fig. 5), she was exposed to and emulated work by Picasso

and Klee. Some of the more formative studio pedagogical moments leading up to Martin’s use of

the grid in the 1960s, were on-site visits to The Museum of Modern Art and seeing a

retrospective of artist Paul Klee in 1941-42.49 In The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the

Garden of Eden we see exposed outline of the bodies of the figures, where the taunt balance of

figuration and abstraction is contained. While still painting, this early work moves to the graphic

quality of Klee’s works on paper. Thinking of Klee’s emphasis on the mechanics of mark-

making proves to be a valuable tool in observing Martin’s language used to describe her own

work. Klee experimented with the emotional potency of color, but more than that alone, the

graphic and flattening nature of Klee’s work from the 1920s has a similar veiling affect to

Martin’s thin application of gesso, paint and graphite line. Most of this experimental evidence in

Martin’s pre-1960s work is lost and presents a challenge for art historians in constructing a past

oeuvre to delineate her maturation. However, through early patronage and the sculptural art

48 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 166. 49 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 33-43.

25

objects remaining from the 1960s, we are able to construct some pedagogical precedence for her

work.

Despite a lack of a definitive chronology of Martin’s early paintings—caused by her

penchant for destroying “immature” work—evidence is present in the influence of progressive

faculty and programming within Teacher’s College in the 1941-42 academic year.50 For

example, Elise Ruffini, an arts faculty member at Teacher’s College, was a connection between

Ad Reinhart and Martin’s time at Columbia. Martin would have likely had Elise as a teacher in

1941 but also was trained within the Art Education program via instructional booklets co-

authored by Ruffini.51 Beginning language used in the instructional material parallels a Bauhaus

pedagogical format through an exploration of materials, bringing design properties to the fore.52

Also in mind with art education, when Martin’s seminal 1973 exhibitions at the Institute of

Contemporary Art at Philadelphia and the Kunstraum München published Martin’s recent lecture

notes, there was an decisive emphasis on experience and personal training, which calls to mind

the legacy of Josef Albers’ writings on art as pedagogical objects.53 Albers’ emphasis on practice

before theory pushed students at the Black Mountain College to experiment with paper before

paint and pay special attention to impressing an eye for color in the mind, without the ease of oil

paint experimentation. Likewise, through the language structure for lectures, and published notes

leading up to her 1973 exhibition at the Kunstraum München, Martin spends a significant portion

of time describing a way to obtain an ideal state of mind, to both receive and act upon inspiration

50 Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, 39-40. 51 This includes New Art Education volume 9 of 1947. See Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life

and Art, 40. 52 Princenthal lists included subject matter of the booklet such as textile design, painting, and

color. Language used in this booklet also describes design in painting as well as emphasizing the

essential elements of painting balanced with emoting a certain feeling. Princenthal, Agnes

Martin: Her Life and Art, 40. 53 Saletnik, “Pedagogic Objects,” 83-101.

26

to which is then translated to her work.54 When we approach Martin’s work in the guise of

pedagogical objects, which are instructional in their formation of individualized emotional

responses from viewers, Martin’s theory and outlook towards art becomes likened to that a role

of craftsman-designer. Anni Albers, Bauhaus-weaving figurehead and wife of Josef Albers,

describes such a role as having reached a state where the intellectual performance of indirect

formation “graphically and verbally” and the elimination of the authorial presence in work has

taken precedence for modern designers.55 Anni Albers’ observes the state of designing as a

climate stuck in the increasingly specialized world, where intellectualization widens a gap

between direct and indirect experience with materials. To resolve this, Albers then prescribes the

need for artists to directly engage with their materials while simultaneously creating an

anonymity between artist and art object.56 The simultaneous ideas of eliminating the self in work

yet allocating a space for intellection of the art-object experience through direct object-

engagement bridges a conceptual problem introduced in formal design training to Martin’s

practice.

Lenore Tawney’s studies provide a glimpse of the pedagogical climate for contemporary

weavers and fiber artists that affected her practice upon arriving to New York and is likely usable

for Martin’s practice. Tawney studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago under Bauhaus

figurehead László Moholy-Nagy. When Tawney arrived, Moholy-Nagy was still present at the

school and Tawney learned weaving under the direction of Marli Ehrman and sculpture and

drawing under Alexander Archipenko. It is worthwhile to note that the Bauhaus instructional

54 Agnes Martin, Agnes Martin, (Munchen: Kunstraum Munchen, 1973), 37-78. 55 Anni Albers, “Design: Anonymous and Timeless,” in Anni Albers: Selected Writings On

Design, Brenda Danilowitz (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 38-

39. 56 Albers, “Design: Anonymous and Timeless,” 34-41.

27

legacy provided two fundamental ideas that were compatible with the language used around

Tawney’s work, of her and by her. First, Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion (1947), a written

work which articulates his curricula for the Chicago Institute of Design, stressed the importance

of both a mechanical and emotional literacy. By the language of ‘mechanical’ and ‘emotional,’

Moholy-Nagy enforced the artistically expressive relevance of design by emphasizing its

relationship to the seemingly ‘mechanical’ production of textiles. To assert the intellectual labor

that goes into both art and design, the mechanical reality of design was equaled with, if not

outweighed temporarily, by emotional intelligence. Often, it is the emotional connectivity that

became the primal reference point in discussion of Tawney’s production of woven forms,

tapestries, and drawings. If we reconsider the argument made by Lawrence Alloway in his

exhibition Systemic Painters, painters who are utilizing repetitive systems to express meaning

are operating on parallel terms: Weavers, deviating from the rectilinear constraints of the

mechanics of the loom, painters, relying on the nuance of geometric repetition. When minor

deviations are made to the structural body of artwork, the viewer must be attuned to the internal

configuration and thus more materially-sensitive towards the works of art. Martin explains in her

maturation with line that her art reaches “an interior balance” and that “People see a color that’s

not there/ our responses are stimulated.”57

In a poignant statement on the emotional intelligence required of artists, Moholy-Nagy

states primarily, “The artist unconsciously disentangles the most essential strands of existence

from the contorted complexities of actuality, and weaves them into an emotional fabric of

compelling validity.”58 Moholy-Nagy’s metaphor initially acknowledges the place of the artist in

manipulating material optimized by a learned intuitive response from the artists to create. But

57 Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” 132. 58 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947), 11.

28

secondly, the association of weaving as a final accumulation of an art-object recalls the process-

oriented term of weaving as it pertains to Bauhaus teaching. Moholy-Nagy’s curriculum focused

on a similar aspect of Josef Albers’ teaching in sensory communication and the perceptual

fundamentals within a termed Material/Materie exercise. This then encompasses material as an

exploration of one’s chosen material’s properties and materie, which shifts towards comparing

properties of multiple materials.59 Both exercises are a staple of design pedagogy, yet, keeping

the ideology of Moholy-Nagy in mind it is useful to examine the visual and emotional balance

present from said curricula in Tawney’s earlier work. To see this idea of emotional fabric,

Tawney’s pattern-making involved an expressive level of chance. While drawing a cartoon for a

design, she did not use a traditional color-indicator to inform the growth of the woven piece but

instead enforced the idea that color and structure develop spontaneously.60 Such training is more

palpable in Tawney’s tapestries and is aptly framed in a studio portrait of the artist (Fig. 6). The

bursts of purples and oranges in St. Francis and the Birds (Fig. 7) are indicative of this process,

adding emotive levity to her figuration. This breakage of formal constraints of weaving

connotate the innovate emotional intelligence promoted by Moholy-Nagy, but also calls to mind

weaving contemporary Anni Albers and her heralding of Peruvian textiles and the idea of woven

pictures. Woven pictures in this sense derived both from the constructed nature of tapestries and

textile as well as the exposure of the weaver’s hand in his or her material application in the

warp/weft structure.

Importantly in relation to Martin’s undulating use of line, implied or incised, is this

additive process of weaving exposing the artists’ hand within the loom. Also in relation to the

59 Saletnik, "Pedagogic Objects,” 92-94. 60 Margo Hoff, “Lenore Tawney: The Warp is Her Canvas,” Craft Horizons 17, no.6, (1957): 17-

18.

29

exposed hand of the artist is the haptic nature of Martin’s nailed paintings, such as Homage to

Greece (Fig. 8), that have iterations both to her use of the repetitive dots within White Flower as

well as Tawney’s woven forms, of which has an intrinsic tactility. Homage to Greece is collaged

white cloth to a canvas, with one singular band of nails creating a firm line atop the materials, a

decisively physical approach to implied line and special effects. This approach in Homage to

Greece, of which Lenore Tawney purchased from Martin, is unexpectedly more akin to collage

than painting. The surprisingly tactile and physicality of the piece claims a space in Martin’s

oeuvre that details her experimentation with the material implications of line, which later

transforms into material-levity, via the collage construction of the canvas.

It is important to note the graphic qualities Tawney was increasingly more interested in

via collage and linear drawings. When creating woven forms and tapestries, drawing was part of

her draughtsman phase of planning her weaving. The grid, as a textile concept, remained a

formal element which is unavoidably part of textiles creations, yet repeatedly, Tawney actively

sought to push against the boundaries of the rectilinear structure of weaving imbued in her work.

This break from material exploration to the medium of drawing and collage was a decisive move

to reconfigure spatial relationships on a two-dimensional plane, parallel to ideas worked with by

Martin. Tawney became fascinated by the mechanism of the Jacquard loom, by its ability to

isolate individual threads and to map these threads on a two-dimensional surface. Likewise,

Martin moved from biomorphic forms, to applying materials to canvas, and then the painterly

grid structure. As such, the figurative association of Tawney’s Lekythos and Martin’s Homage to

Greece should not be taken as mimetic so much as a referent to linear elements developing in the

canvas to induce an emotive experience in the viewer. Both artists used a material exploration to

enhance the qualities of the linear image into their practice. Conducive to linear ideas of void,

30

space, and structure materially explored by both artists, is the language they used to define their

practice to frame an emotive or experiential presence with art objects.

Figure 5: Agnes Martin, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, 1953,

oil on paperboard, 48 x 72 in., Private collection, © 2017 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society

(ARS), New York

Figure 6: Lenore Tawney in her Chicago studio, 1957, Photo: Aaron Siskind, Courtesy,

Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

31

Figure 7: Lenore Tawney, St. Francis and the Birds, 1954, Wool; 32 1⁄2 x 17 1⁄2 in.,

Courtesy, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

Figure 8: Agnes Martin, Homage to Greece, 1959, oil, canvas collage and nails laid

down on panel, 12 x 12 in., Christie’s, © 2017 Agnes Martin/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New

York

32

4 ART AND SPIRITUALITY

While Tawney was openly vocal about spirituality as a component of her work, Martin

had a penchant for using spiritual language for universal feelings by using metaphor, prose, or

analogy to further statements on her art practice. As with her introduction into New York as a

Southwest artist, Romantic associations with the land and desert pervaded in language used to

describe Martin’s work and background. Tied to this association were also deeply held spiritual

connotations. One of the prevalent views of Martin over time was her aura as mystic-artist that

was fed by Martin’s dramatic exit from New York in 1967 to return to New Mexico. The

pilgrimage to see Martin in the desert became a sort of art-world rite of passage. However, it is

important to define the differences within terms of religious, mystical, and spiritual when

discussing how the artist used terminology to give agency to her work as opposed to others

assigning a status or aura to her as an artist. “Religious” usually connotates a prescribed

relationship with a specific religion, of which Martin never clearly associated with other than

through the uses of analogy for personalized concepts. “Mystical” and “Mystics” are more in line

with the spectacle of awe, fascination, and spiritual mystery. This classification robs Martin of a

certain intellectual agency given to her practice and privileges spectacle over process. This

terminology arose in Martin’s case over a combination of factors including her solitary choice of

life, Spartan living habits, schizophrenia, and terse social mannerisms. She readily denounced

any mystical associations to her work though she occasionally collapsed the terms of mystic and

hermit.61 “Spiritual” can be related to a specific religious experience, but most importantly, the

terms holds connotations of a broader human soul, spirit, and states of being. Martin often cites

the importance of mind and will, mixed with associations of nature, the Bible, Buddhism, and

61 Agnes Martin, “The Untroubled Mind,” In Haskell, Barbra, et. all., Agnes Martin, 135.

33

Taoist sensibilities in order relay both her state of creating art and how to experience art. The

importance behind these distinctions rests in how Martin used spiritual language to frame

universalities and experiences imbued in art and life. Spiritual references and concepts furthered

ideas of void and egolessness that operated parallel to Martin’s maturing use of line and color.

Spirituality in its philosophical distillation became an important component of crafts,

textiles, and the avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s. While each artist experienced different

pedagogical approaches towards their separate art practice, it is important to discuss the

relationship between Tawney and Martin’s studio practice in line with spiritual and interfaith

concepts. For Tawney, spirituality was not only evident in her musings about her work as aiding

abstraction in her art but also with her penchant for voraciously reading poetry and mystical

writings.62 Martin, however, was involved in spirituality through reading, lecture circuits, and

conversations. The notion of craft, as a creation process and spirituality, in its lending of

terminology for contemporary art production, intersected with the increasing attention given to

Buddhist thought in New York. While Martin was enrolled at Teacher’s College, D.T. Suzuki, a

visiting lecturer and Buddhist scholar, became a fully appointed faculty member from 1952 to

1957. Rosenberger notes that his role as a visiting scholar at several universities across the West

and East coast, introduced the United States to Buddhism and Buddhist thought.63 Taos, New

Mexico had a thriving artist community circling topics of spiritualism mixed with interest in the

land. Brought with the European-derived modernism of relocating artists and intellectuals was a

distinct local interest in nontraditional spiritual practices. Such an interest established the Taos-

based Transcendental Painting Group in 1938, which “under the influence of Wassily

62 Sigrid Wortmann Weltige, “Spiritual Revolutionary: Lenore Tawney,” in Lenore Tawney:

Wholly Unlooked For (Baltimore: Maryland Institute College of Art, 2013), 95. 63 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 44-46.

34

Kandinsky, studied Theosophy…integrating various, esoteric, arcane Easter and Western

spiritual traditions.”64 The next generation of spiritual influence to take over the East coast,

propagated by D.T. Suzuki, would have been far from unfamiliar to Martin by her arrival in New

York in 1957 with this preexisting Taos legacy in mind.

Martin’s own statements concerning Buddhism specifically during her early career were

more positive than her post-1973 reflections. Martin is on the record through conversation with

friends and colleagues of praising Lao Tzu’s Tao de Ching, even recommending it as reading

material.65 The Tao’s overarching notion that reality comes from nothingness and void was

especially complimentary for Martin and ratifies her commitment towards the prerequisites to

Buddhist paintings described by Suzuki which include being empty yet receptive. While Taoist

philosophy is often incorporated into aspects of various Buddhist thought, Taoism was often

conflated with Buddhism thus it is a vital aspect of the interfaith philosophic conversation,

especially when paired with prevalent Christian themes.

Aside from the regional development of spiritual interest Martin expressed individually,

it is worthwhile to acknowledge the Western interpretations of Eastern spirituality in America

leading up to the 1960s. Initially, this included Transcendentalism through the writings of Henry

David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose journal The Dial incorporated a translated

version of the Lotus Sutra in 1844. Following an investigation of Transcendentalism, Beat poets

such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac rediscovered Buddhist sources and would begin to add

to the cultural momentum that would go on to spark a termed “Zen Boom” among intellectual

circles. Also, when talking about the initial Zen Boom in American pop culture and the avant-

64 Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Her Art, 49. 65 Princenthal, Agnes Martin: Her Life and Her Art, 106.

35

garde in the 1950s, what is emphasized is the importance of meditation and a mind-body

relationship. These overarching themes are of import considering it is not until the mid-1960s

that a significant body of Zen Buddhist institutions are thoroughly established, meaning that

literature, word-of-mouth, and lecture circuits were primary sources of philosophical contact. It

is in the macro meditative dialog that we see in Tawney and Martin, between their ideas

concerning line and thread, notions of Zen Buddhist and interfaith philosophical thought are

incorporated. Concepts of void, nature, and the mind become avenues of cross-material

exploration. For instance, while Tawney’s earliest work concerns weaving, drawings became of

significant importance to Tawney. In an interview, Tawney relates her drawing process with

meditation and line:

I was just doing…some of these drawings…I have to be so concentrated in order to keep

within my outline. I make an outline and then I do my drawing to go past the line, I have

to be with this line…it’s like meditation, you have to be with the line all the time, you

can’t be thinking of anything because if you think you’ll go right on outside your line. 66

Also in relation to natural forms, as in the case of Dark River, a woven form that brought

the artist much acclaim, Tawney stresses the elemental importance of natural elements over a

possible direct presence in her work: “I don’t think of it as nature as much as water has other –

you know [characteristics] water is fertilizing and water is dissolving and water is cleansing and

water is life giving.”67 The elemental importance and emphasis on natural processes are in line

with the macro phenomena of Zen Buddhist thought that was another crucial cultural focus point,

and in part a carry-over of transcendentalism. For Martin, the process of the viewer experience

66 Interview of Lenore Tawney, by Paul Cummings, June 23, 1971, Archives of American Art,

Smithsonian Institution. 67 Lenore Tawney, Archives of American Art, n.p.

36

weighs of specific importance. The ideal dialog between viewer and art object, as described by

Martin, almost aims to locate her artwork into spaces of immutability, as more of a means to

elicit an emotional response. Yet, out of the spaces of void and negation, through linear

elements, grids became an increasingly important tool for Martin in the 1960s.

In terms of non-hierarchical structure, it is also important to note that ideas such as

innocence felt satisfyingly realized after Martin came to working with the grid in her drawings

and paintings. Innocence for Martin concerned linear and color factors to produce art which

served as a vehicle for experiences. In 1992, Martin stated retrospectively:

It wasn’t until I found the grid, in New York in 1960, that I felt satisfied with what I was

doing. When I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees. And I

though the grid represented innocence, and I still do. So I painted it, and I’ve been doing

it for thirty years68

In a similar vernacular towards her grids within and experience of work, Martin also

stresses an elemental level of importance, as per Tawney’s description of Dark River. In

reception towards her work regarding titles or ties of her paintings to landscapes, Martin

explains:

I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience

when they look at landscapes, so I never protest when they say my work is like

landscape. But really it is about the feeling of beauty and freedom, that you experience in

landscape.69

68 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 154. 69 Agnes Martin, quoted in Irving Sandler, “Agnes Martin, An Interview,” Art Monthly

(September 1993): 11 in 3 x Abstractions, New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma

Kunz, and Agnes Martin, Kathryn A. Tuma (New York: The Drawing Center, 2005), 50.

37

In a later interview in 1989, Martin provided a more condensed and clarified explanation of what

the concept of innocents in painting might mean by her response towards using titles:

…As a matter of fact I have titled my paintings, like when I thought of the innocence of a

tree I called my painting, “The Tree.” But it was really about the innocence. And other

titles that I have given, “Desert Flower” and “White Flower” and—it isn’t really about a

flower, it’s really about a mental experience. It’s like Solomon in the Bible, you know,

the Song of Solomon? That’s really a mental experience, the Song of Solomon, but

everybody reads it as a [pause]—as erotic, really. It’s a heart/mind experience.70

By referring to the Song of Solomon, Martin emphasizes the importance of the dream element of

the prose as well as its allegorical configuration. On one hand, the dream element of the woman

present in the poem in Song on Solomon places the reader within the imaging process of the

mind, and on the other, creates an elaborate scene which condenses to a feeling of love. Martin

often speaks and writes with an allegorical intensity that parallels to teachings of theosophical

doctrines and explains in part her disposition for words such as innocence. How do we resolve

the idea of innocence in, say, Martin’s painting White Flower of 1960? Unlike her later works

which remain largely untitled and thus require more experiential work of the viewer, having a

nature referent tied to the non-representational grid might invoke the tracery of said concept as a

key to encompassing the experience of a white flower.71 Through a Buddhist principle of seeking

void and/or nothingness, an abstract process reveals the object without the figurative visual

representation, connotations, and plastic reproduction to obtain a form likened to an experience.

Through the structured screen created by the white grid and wash, the viewer is optically invited

70 Interview of Agnes Martin, by Suzan Campbell, May 15, 1989, Archives of American Art,

Smithsonian. 71 It is important to note that after 1973, Martin decisively un-titled her work as a way to

encourage a more expansive investigation toward the experience of the painting and to dispel

landscape/nature essentialism with her work.

38

to actively participate with the idea of said flower by delving between the lines, confronting

void, and structure.

To compliment these phrasings by Martin and Tawney, lectures and writings by D.T.

Suzuki reveal fundamental universals of Zen that are absorbed by other cultures and into the arts.

Suzuki notes the cultural influences of Zen Buddhist thought, both in a macro and micro sense,

in six components, some of which apply to the methodology used by both Martin and Tawney.

First, there lies the concept of the neglect of form as a universal characteristic within mysticism

and spirituality. Zen, however, has a forcefulness to the idea on inwardness. Secondly, “the

inwardness of Zen implies a directness of its appeal to the Human Spirit.” The visual analogy

used by Suzuki to drive this point is that “When a syllable or a wink is enough, why spend one’s

entire life in writing huge books or building a grandiose cathedral?” Third, Suzuki states that in

Zen “Directness is another word for simplicity.” Bouncing off the idea of the visual example

previously mentioned, directness is defined as discarding the paraphernalia in idea articulation.

Through a confirmation of these conditions a general Zen attitude of thought is formed in life

and can be translated in the arts through a Zen Aestheticism. Features of this aestheticism include

“simplicity, directness, abandonment, boldness, aloofness, unworldliness, innerliness, the

disregarding of form, free movement of spirit, [and] the mystical breathing of a creative

genius…” In terms of art practice, Suzuki states that this criterion covers a breadth of mediums

including, but not limited to, gardening, calligraphy, painting, and fencing.72

In translating the intricacies of Zen Buddhist thought, Suzuki describes the importance of

sumiye ink painting, beginning in twelfth century Japan. Initially the components of the art used

“ink made of soot and glue,” a brush of “sheep’s or badger’s hair” and extremely thin paper, the

72 Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (third Series), edited By Christmas

Humphreys (New York: S. Weiser, 1971), 347-349.

39

combination of which limits the artist to quick singular movements. The precision of execution

was not a byproduct of a logic and planning, but an act of spontaneous movement, where artist or

brush moves without conscious effort. Suzuki states “There is no chiaroscuro, no perspective in

it. Indeed, they are not needed in Sumiye, which makes no pretension to realism. It attempts to

make the spirit of an object move on paper.”73 In the later development of sumiye painting,

which includes the fiftieth-century landscape by Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees (Fig. 9), misty,

delicate strokes reveal the likeness of trees but do not reproduce in excess. The character of the

trees is revealed through the gesture, or implication, of trees being represented. As in Martin’s

1963 Falling Blue the unmarked canvas plays an integral role such as the defining negative space

of mist in Pine Trees. Likewise, Martin’s reduction toward graphite lines with oil on canvas

demarcate a material balance much like the ink and rice paper of sumiye. The thinly banded

graphite lines reveal the hand of the artist while also relying on the flickering optical

concentration through visual movement between color and line. Regarding sumiye, negative

space either implied or actual inversely reveals only the essential strokes of paint. Like the

limitations imposed by sumiye, materiality is both a confining and guiding facet. Tawney’s

impression of a vase in Lekythos, uses threadbare linen, neutral in color, to capture the essential

components of a vessel while simultaneously abstracting the textile gesture to line. For Martin,

the delineation of her hand in graphite and brushwork carefully impose their constructed nature

linear frame and their hand-crafted nature. Unlike the structural implication implied by a overall

grid, the gestural graphite reveals the spontaneity likened to the sumiye ink painting method.

Adding to the spontaneity of mark-making, Martin was known to have pinned a thread to either

73 Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, 351.

40

side of her canvas to delicately incise her lines.74 Likewise, Tawney’s interested in the linear

webbing of thread, imposes a negative space of exposed material/void in Lekythos. Negative

space is important real estate in the landscape of Martin’s canvas. The essential confrontation of

nothingness to extract something akin to happiness is understood through optical/spatial

movement, as is the relationship of the viewer to a sculptural woven form. In Falling Blue, the

viewer when moving closer experiences a disarming confrontation of Martin’s rectilinear

constraints as woven planes as visual order rendered soft and the canvas pliable. If thinking

about Josef Albers’ stance on art as pedagogical objects, the viewer becomes self-conscious of

their perception when confronting the canvas, a byproduct of the undulating blue against graphite

against void in Falling Blue. This perceptive self-consciousness is the resting stop in which

Martin declares mindfulness, albeit a conflation of theosophical philosophies in her writings,

lectures, and interviews, as content.

Figure 9: Hasegawa Tohaku, Pine Trees, 16th century, pair of six-folded screens and ink on

paper, 61.7 × 140.2 in., Tokyo National Museum, © 2017 Tokyo National Museum

74 Barbara Haskell, Agnes Martin, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), 105.

41

5 MATERIALS, SPIRIT, TEXTILES, AND PAINTING

We have previously identified the associations of spiritual ideology and linguistic choices

made by both Martin and Tawney, which have a thread of significance in Buddhist concepts of

void and innerliness, but it is pertinent to establish deeply entrenched ideas of spirituality in

Modernist art theory and a correlation to textiles. Undeniably prevalent is the Hegelian dialectic

which relies on a linear instance of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A partial Hegelian approach

used by Jonathan Katz concerns Martin’s supplanted dialectical model whereby instead of a

synthesis related to her work, Martin persists to resist a solution and continue with an unresolved

equilibrium:

Martin's art generally, each instance of dialectical opposition is not resolved-cannot be

resolved-so much as modeled again and again. As with Shiva's cycles of birth and

destruction, there is no progress here, no escape through higher cognition: again, no

resolution. There is only experiential duration, the acceptance of a permanent and

irresolvable cycle. 75

While useful in defining Martin’s anti-ego as well as gender non-conformity, this

perspective reifyies the systematic painting approach and also assumes that experiential duration

is where the viewer experience begins and ends. But if we reframe how Martin’s oeuvre

consisted of compositional changes within Homage to Greece to Falling Blue, it is unfair to

claim that social factors were not incorporated (or synthesized) into Martin’s gridwork in the

1960s. Alternatively, it proves more useful to return toward Hegel in a different light for a

theoretical context that imbues the linear elements of both textiles and painting. First, there is a

preexisting lineage of language around textiles and abstraction that is favorable to ideas of inner

75 Jonathan Katz, “Agnes Martin and the Sexuality of Abstraction,” Academia, March 2, 2016,

https://www.academia.edu/5646796/KATZ_MARTIN, 190.

42

spirit discussed previously by an inwardness of Zen Buddhism. In Hegelian terminology, Geist is

of importance. Geist, or spirit, has four definitive categories for Hegel: the intangible side of

humanity, the spirit of the times (Zeitgeist), the intellect, or Weltgeist. Weltgiest, or World-Spirit

is often interpreted as the concept of God, but less so of the Judeo-Christian sense and more so as

a “transcendental and ultimately unknowable” where our “physical reality” is an object that

through time, gradually begins to know itself.76 Hegel’s Geist and Weltgeist, combined with

Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, produces an idea of spirit and soul in art is essential

and that which does not derive from an inner necessity is a genre of formalism. To turn to

Kandinsky’s influence on Abstract Expressionism is to glean the communicative importance

within Martin’s work that dances with Hegelian terms such as inner necessity and Geist as an

intellectually based metaphysic. Martin was a lifelong admirer of Mark Rothko’s use of color

and inherited the appreciation of Kandinsky’s legacy while adhering to the identification of an

Abstract Expressionist.77 Language used by Martin has an undeniable spiritual currency which

imbues her lectures and discussion of her work and is visible in her prose in The Untroubled

Mind.

Wassily Kandinsky wrote about the influence of Theosophical societies within his work

Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Much like the rhetoric both Martin and Tawney use in

describing mind and process, these mentioned Theosophical societies focus on the matter of

spirit through exploration of inner knowledge.78 In his ideological defense of abstraction,

Kandinsky cites the geometric relevance of the triangle in placing the role of the artist before his

76 Jeremy Elie Caslin, Kandinsky's Theory of Art: Hegel, the Beginnings of Abstraction, and Art

History (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1998), 85. 77 Rosenberger, Drawing the Line, 12-14. 78 Wassily Kandinsky and Michael Sadleir, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (London: Tate,

2006), 19.

43

transition towards color and form. First, he describes a pyramidal form of human progress

towards the spiritual through the movement of above and below sections of the triangle.

Secondly, he relays the pyramidal composition of figures in art towards a natural advancement

towards the peak of the triangle, exalting the abstract ideal over naturalistic form. Kandinsky in

attempting to capture a cosmos, or as art historian Bracha L. Ettinger claims, through a process

of “cosmic catastrophe and cosmic renewal” discusses the relationship of social order and

spiritual order, which become manifest in this instance his definition of artistic abstraction.79

Such a stance is reified in his discussion of color and form, and by extension mark-making

practices, through metaphor and visual reduction. This mark-making practice appears first in his

discussion of text to the act of drawing: “…repetition of the word, twice, three times or even

more frequently…will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also bring to light

unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself…,” yet conversely, like the abstraction native

to repetitive drawing, “…Frequent repetition of a word deprives the word of its original external

meaning.”80 This process of negation is felt in various iterations of work by both Martin and

Tawney in the 1960s. Through a similar material language used by Martin and Tawney,

repetition of line and thread, makes their viewer acutely aware of the physical properties present

in the work. And through the viewer’s capacity of visually surmising the whole of Martin’s

canvases, we can use this Hegelian and Kandinsky approach to define a linear exploration of

Martin by way of Tawney. Likewise, adding to the perception of Martin’s emerging process

upon reaching the grid in the 1960s, Hegel writes of Spirit being revealed in the absence of

79 Bracha L. Ettinger, “The Art-And-Healing Oeuvre: Metramorphic Relinquishment of the Soul-

Spirit to the Spirit of the Cosmos,” in 3 x Abstractions, New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af

Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin (New York: The Drawing Center, 2005), 212. 80 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 30.

44

substance, or negativity “when the artist dwells with the potentiality of the negative” until a point

of reveal is reached.81

In furthering the discussion of mobility on the triangular spectrum of Kandinsky, a

socially-minded synthesis of artistic process, we can correlate a mastery of Hegelian spirit with

Kandinsky’s criteria for self-mastery and awareness for artists. Kandinsky defines an inner need

for the arts first, as the artist identifying a proficiency to create. Martin speaks of this in lecture

and notes as identifying the need for creation and inspiration in all activities, artist, and laymen

alike. Second, the artist is compelled by the spirit of his age (sometimes referred to as style).

While I am decisively choosing not to blanket Martin in a style, the period in which multiple

artists experimented with found objects and material at The Slip is no doubtedly a unifying agent

for Tawney and Martin. And lastly, the artist excels the cause of art.82 A mutual exchange of

both ideological backgrounds, philosophy, and studio practice is a pragmatic step forward in

such a direction.

Another point of inspection is Martin’s claim for abstraction and Kandinsky’s

commentary on the matter. Kandinsky posits that the artist’s selection process of material subject

matter versus the abstract is influenced by the idea of inner necessity. Kandinsky even posits that

true knowledge is observable in a rudimentarily constructed column in another country that holds

a similar ‘spirit’ as to a work of art.83 What is instructional in theory is implied through the

subjective process of viewing both Martin’s and Tawney’s art objects. Martin’s proclaims

81 Ettinger, “The Art-And-Healing Oeuvre: Metramorphic Relinquishment of the Soul-Spirit to

the Spirit of the Cosmos,” 204. 82 All above points are referred to in succession in Kandinsky’s conversation over the variant

properties of form and color and the mastery of each. See Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual

in Art, 28-34. 83 Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 34.

45

perfection and innocence in her work, where Falling Blue’s perfection is the viewer’s act of

approach, coming into the fold, and feeling the impossibility of containing the canvas. Tawney

also achieves this impossible lightness, through the increasing negative space of the warp, to the

point of almost obsolescence in thread-bare Lekythos.

While inner necessity may elicit romantic ideas of the plight of the artist, it is useful to

see how such a term stands with the notion of material-levity used in work by both Martin and

Tawney. Furthermore, the 1950s and 1960s showcased a need for artists and critics to both claim

an authority for a newly emergent art and re-materialize a physical relationship with art-objects.

For Tawney, by her New York arrival in 1957, this was an accompanied by both a desire for

clarity in her practice and a way to “live her work.”84 In terms of their overall disposition, Martin

and Tawney were both known to have a penchant for silence, thoughtful and philosophical

conversation that parallels an innerliness of life and art-objects. Motivations by Tawney and

Martin in their practice in the 1960s were not rooted in a direct form of communication, as one

might deduct if approaching a mathematical analysis of Martin’s grid-to-canvas ratios.85 Instead,

both artists were more interested in providing the viewer with an opportunity to participate in a

communicative dialog with art-objects—such as the physical approach to Falling Blue, and the

varying feelings and thoughts one confronts throughout the viewing process.

In material terms, this is the subtle confrontation of form is partial through the viewer

second-guessing themself over the structure of art-objects. In Lenore Tawney’s The Queen, the

density of the warp and weft bottlenecks at the top and bottom of the structure, and expands in

size as the pieces develops downward. Simultaneously, increased is the number of vertical slits,

84 Seelig, “Thinking Lenore Tawney,”19. 85 A similar inspection is formed in Warren Seelig’s analysis of Tawney’s work. See Seelig,

“Thinking Lenore Tawney,” 20.

46

piercing the solidity of the structure. This void is further complicated by the tendrils of linen left

loose in the center body of the piece, calling attention to the exposed linear nature of the

structure. In Martin’s Falling Blue, after considering the density of material in Homage to

Greece and an implied use of line, Martin expands the canvas field by the subtle interplay of

graphite line, gesso, and blue paint, the last of which feathers at the edges with its dry

application. Homage to Greece has a sense of material stasis, in that its physicality does not get

called into question. However, once Martin converts line to an optical warp and weft, the art-

object then prescribes the participation of the viewer to move and interact with the canvas, to a

capacity more implicit to tapestry. Material-levity, centrally configured around a warp and weft

or grid, exposes an aspect of interiority to which blurs the structural integrity implicit in

sculpture-to-textile and textile-to-painting dialog.

47

6 CONCLUSION

More importantly than merely mimicking the structures of philosophy, an interest in

interfaith structures through language used by Martin and Tawney calls attention towards a

cultural desire for unity—be it emotional, mental, or social. Far from encouraging the

mystical/mythic dialog around Martin and Tawney, the former of which accelerated drastically

since 1973, I have sought to reclaim the minutia of artistic practice through the controlled

medium and/or material experimentation through the work of Martin, as it pertains to Tawney’s

early work. By the repeated deviations from a warp/weft or a grid-like framework, Martin

developed a practice that increasingly focused on the experiential relationship between the

material presence of art-object to viewer. The calligraphic mark-making and essence-based

discussion of creation are useful tools in comparing thematic closeness to Tawney and Martin’s

methodological development, especially considering how each artist began defining her practice

in New York at the same time. With metaphor and analogy to non-Western spirituality, both

artists sought a language to imbue their work with experiential relevance. Curricula that involved

developing emotional intelligence, medium exploration and mark-making are only furthered by a

prevalent Zen Buddhist perspective which received accumulating interest in the United States

during the 1950s onward. Specifically, both artists have similarly articulated processes towards

the inner necessity of creating that spans the high and low spectrum of art production. Such ideas

of inwardness and inner necessity are indebted to the theoretical framework constructed by both

Hegel and Kandinsky. While contemporaneous pedagogy contained the legacy of Hegel and

Kandinsky, who had impact in studio training from the ideological foundations of Abstract

Expressionism to the American Bauhaus movement, I’ve used their writing to parallel the

practices of internal inspection and a material lightness articulation with Martin’s early work.

48

While Agnes Martin proclaimed that she had begun painting once she developed the grid in

1960s, Tawney professed that she considered all versions of her work weaving, be it collage or

assemblage. Both artists drafted a dialog on art making along themes of meditation, emptiness,

and thoughtful action, theoretically defining a space beyond the main current of Minimalism,

Abstract Expressionism, and Fiber Art production by pulling from both their artistic training and

environment. With deviations between applied materials to canvas, biomorphic shapes, and

geometric ones as well, it is important to note the measure Martin took to discourage inspection

of her early work, such as measures she took to discourage catalog texts and destroy work she

found too immature. Through patrons and colleagues, of which Lenore Tawney was both, we

begin to see how interpersonal exchanges inform and direct Martin’s gridwork.

49

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